The Wrecker

41

ONE HOUR LATER IN ST. LOUIS, A TELEGRAM ARRIVED AT THE basement hovel of an anarchist who had fled Italy and changed his name to Francis Rizzo. Rizzo closed the door on the Western Union messenger boy’s face before he opened the envelope. A single word was typed on the buff-colored form:

“Now.”

Rizzo threw on his hat and coat, caught a streetcar to a neighborhood where no one knew him, purchased a quart tin of kerosene, and boarded another streetcar, which carried him toward the Mississippi River. He got off and walked quickly through a warehouse district until he found a saloon in the shadow of the levee. He ordered a beer and ate a sausage at the free-lunch counter, eyes locked on the swinging doors. The instant that warehouse workers and carters barreled in, marking the end of the business day, Rizzo left the saloon and hurried along dark streets to the offices of the Union Pier amp; Caisson Company.

A clerk was locking up, the last man out. Rizzo watched from across the street until he was sure the offices were empty. Then, on a route plotted months earlier, he entered an alley that led to a narrow passage between the back of the building and the levee standing between it and the river. He tugged a loose board, pulled out a short crowbar he had stashed behind it, and pried open a window. He climbed in, found the central wooden staircase that led to the top of the three-story building, climbed it, and opened several windows. Then he pierced the kerosene tin with his pocketknife and started back down the stairs, splashing the volatile liquid on the steps. At the bottom, he lit a match, touched it to the kerosene, and watched the flames leap up the dry wood. He waited until he was sure that the wood itself had caught fire. Then he slipped back out the window and left it open to feed the draft.

ISAAC BELL RODE THE slow Snake Line switchback train down to the town of Cascade. Eric Soares had told Franklin Mowery that he might work late, as he often did. As usual, he would take his supper in the town, then would bunk down in one of the guard shacks beside the piers and start work early in the morning rather than waste time riding the train back up to the top.

When Bell got to the guard shacks, the detective discovered that the supposedly hardworking Soares had quit early.

No one knew where he had gone.

DOWN THE RIVER FROM the original town of Cascade, a shanty-and-tent city called Hell’s Bottom had sprung up. It owed its existence to the ironworkers, masons, and caisson miners who’d built the Cascade Canyon Bridge, the railroaders who’d laid the steep Snake Line from the town and its lowland railhead up to the bridge, and the lumberjacks and teamsters who had revived the old East Oregon Lumber Company back in the mountains.

Eric Soares headed for Hell’s Bottom, feeling flush. In fact, he thought, with the cash in his pocket that the Senator had forked over as the first of many payments, he was sure to be the richest man in the boomtown tonight. He was also in love, which his hard-knocks youth had demonstrated was about as half-witted as a man could get. Particularly falling in love with a whore. Half-witted or not, he visited her every night he could get away from Old Man Mowery. Now, thanks to the Senator, he could afford to keep her for himself all night long.

There were three grades of brothels in Hell’s Bottom.

The roughest serviced the lumberjacks and mule skinners. The men risked their lives to get there Saturday nights by shooting the rapids down the rocky river in “Hell’s Bottom Flyers,” dugout canoes made by hollowing logs with axes and fire.

The women of the next-roughest brothels serviced the railroad gangs, who arrived via the Snake Line. Track layers descended on Saturday night. Trainmen, brakemen, conductors, and locomotive engineers working railroad schedules swaggered in night and day swinging their red lanterns.

There was only one top-grade establishment. Gabriel’s was comparatively genteel, particularly by western boomtown standards, and more expensive than a laboring man could dream of affording. Its customers were the upstanding business owners and professionals of Cascade, wealthy tourists staying at the famous lodge, and the higher-paid senior engineers, lawyers, and managers who worked for the railroad.

Madame Gabriel greeted Eric Soares like the regular he had become.

“I would like Joanna,” he told her.

“Engaged, sir.”

“I’ll wait.”

“She’s gonna be a while,” she said.

He felt a foolish stab of jealousy. Foolish, sure, he thought. But the feeling was as real as the sudden angry pounding of his heart that made it difficult to breathe.

“There’s a new girl you might enjoy.”

“I’ll wait for Joanna.”

If provoked, Madame Gabriel had the coldest eyes he had ever seen on a woman. They grew icy now, and despite his broad experience of the world for one so young Eric felt something akin to fear. He looked away, afraid of provoking her further.

She surprised him with a warm smile. “Tell you what, sir. The new girl is yours on the house if you can look me in the face after and tell me she wasn’t worth top dollar. In fact, I’ll even give you your money back if you can honestly tell me she isn’t better than Joanna. How can you lose?”

How could he lose?

Madame Gabriel’s bouncer walked him to a door in the back of the sprawling house, knocked for him, and threw it open. Eric stepped into a room glowing with pink lantern light. The bouncer closed the door behind him. Two men dressed like lumberjacks closed in from both sides.

A gun barrel materialized out of a blur of motion. It whizzed past the hand he raised too late to stop it and smacked his skull. He felt his legs collapse under him as if his bones had turned to jelly. He tried to yell. They yanked a rough sack over his head, tied his wrists behind him. He tried to kick them. They smashed him in the groin. While he was gasping, paralyzed with pain, they tied his ankles, picked him up, and carried him out of the building. He felt himself slung over a saddle, felt his hands and feet looped under the horse. He yelled through the sack. They hit his head again, and he lost consciousness.

He awoke as they untied his hands and feet, jerked his arms behind his back, and tied his hands again. They removed the sack and shined a light in his eyes. The two men were hulking shadows behind the light. He smelled water and heard it running. They were in some sort of cellar with water in it. Like a mill, he thought, with a stream racing through. The lumberjacks leaned in from the shadows.

“What is the name of your old bunkie from the orphanage?”

“Go to hell,” said Eric Soares.

They grabbed his feet, jerked him into the air upside down, and lowered his head into the ice-cold stream. He was so startled, he didn’t have time to take a deep breath. He ran out of air, struggling frantically. He struggled so hard, his glasses unhooked from his ears. He couldn’t stop himself from breathing in. Water filled his nose and mouth. They lifted him out of the water and held him, still upside down, with his face inches from the stream.

“The name of your bunkie from the orphanage.”

“Why do you . . .” he started to ask, even though he knew exactly why.

He had misread the Senator. Kincaid had turned out to be no patsy.

The lumberjacks dropped him headfirst in the water again. He had had time to suck in air, and he held it as long as he could. Arching his back, he tried to rise out of the water. They pushed him in deeper and held him until he had to breathe in. Water filled his nose and mouth. He struggled, but his strength was failing, and his whole body gradually went limp. They pulled him up. Coughing and gasping, he vomited water and finally sucked in air. As he caught his breath, he could hear them speaking. He began to realize they had pulled him out so they could ask again.

“The name of your bunkie from the orphanage.”

“Paul,” he gasped.

“Last name?”

“What are you going-”

“Last name? ”

He hesitated. After lights-out in the orphanage, he and Paul had stood back-to-back, fighting off anyone who tried to attack them. He felt their hands tighten around his ankles. “No!” he screamed, but he was already underwater again, raw throat and nose burning, vision fading to pink, then to black. When they finally pulled him out, he yelled, “Paul Samuels! Paul Samuels! Paul Samuels!”

“Where does he live?”

“Denver,” Soares gasped.

“Where does he work?”

“Bank.”

“What bank?”

“First Silver. What are you going to do to him?”

“We already done him. Just wanted to make sure we got the right bunkie.”

They lowered Eric Soares’s face into the stream again and he knew it was for the last time.

THEY SEARCHED THE PULLMANS, but no one could find Franklin Mowery’s assistant. Isaac Bell dispatched railroad police to search Cascade and the boomtown downriver called Hell’s Bottom. But he doubted they would find him. A foreman had vanished too, along with several Union Pier amp; Caisson laborers.

Bell went to Osgood Hennessy. “You better inspect the bridge piers,” he said, grimly. “That’s what he worked on.”

“Franklin Mowery’s already down there,” Hennessy replied. “He’s wired Union Pier all morning. No reply yet.”

“I doubt he’ll get one.”

Bell wired Van Dorn’s St. Louis office. The answer came back immediately. The headquarters of the Union Pier amp; Caisson Company had burned to the ground.

“What time?” Bell wired back.

The return wire was a testament to the Wrecker’s inside information. Adjusting for the difference between Pacific and Central time zones, the first alarm for the fire had been turned in less than two hours after Bell had confronted Franklin Mowery with his suspicions about Eric Soares.

Bell had seen Emma Comden with Hennessy when Mowery reported his concerns about the piers. But within minutes, Hennessy had summoned a dozen cutoff engineers to access the potential for disaster that Mowery feared. So Emma was not the only one aware. Still, Bell had to wonder whether the beautiful woman was playing the old man for a fool.

Bell went looking for Mowery and found him in one of the guard shacks protecting the piers. There were tears in the old man’s eyes. He had blueprints spread out on the table where the railroad cops ate supper and a folder of reports filed by Eric Soares.

“False,” he said, thumbing through the pages. “False. False. False. False… The piers are unstable. A flood of water will cause them to collapse.”

Bell found it hard to believe. From where he stood in the guard shack, the massive stone piers supporting the airy towers that held the bridge truss looked solid as fortresses.

But Mowery nodded bleakly out the window at a barge tied alongside the nearest pier. Tenders lifted a diver out of the water and unhinged his faceplate. Bell recognized the new Mark V helmet. That the company spared no expense was yet another indication of the importance of the bridge.

“What do you mean?” Bell asked.

Mowery fumbled for a pencil and drew a sketch of the pier standing in the water. At the foot of the pier, he scratched the pencil point through the paper.

“We call it scour. The effect of scour occurs when the water scoops a hole in the riverbed immediately upstream of the pier. All of a sudden, the footing is not supported. It will plunge into this hole or crack under the unequal forces… We have built our house on sand.”